Skewering Seattle’s Microsoft Elite

‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette,’ a Maria Semple Novel

The free-range hilarity of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” begins with Bee Branch’s report card from Galer Street School in Seattle, “a place where compassion, academics and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet.” This school gives three grades: S for “Surpasses Excellence,” A for “Achieves Excellence” and W for “Working Towards Excellence.” So every kid is some kind of excellent. But Bee is a straight-S student all the way.

Next: Bee tells her parents, Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch, that they promised her anything she wanted for a middle school graduation present, and that she’s ready to collect. “It was to ward off further talk of a pony,” Bernadette says about that vow. Still, she would much rather give her daughter a four-legged, hay-eating gift than the one Bee has in mind.

Now we leap to Bernadette’s correspondence with Manjula Kapoor, her “virtual assistant from India,” who sounds willing to indulge Bernadette’s every whim for a whopping 75 cents an hour. Bernadette tosses all graduation gift plans in Manjula’s direction. Manjula is polite, efficient and only rarely confused by Bernadette’s ramblings.

“Have it all shipped to the manse,” Bernadette babbles about the merchandise she wants mail-ordered. “You’re the best!”

“What is manse?” Manjula replies. “I do not find it in any of my records.”

Now we see a fund-raising letter to the Galer Street School Parent Association from a guy calling himself Ollie-O, whose goal is to make this Seattle school as desirable as Lakeside, Bill Gates’s alma mater. “Grab your crampons,” Ollie-O writes in boldface, “because we have an uphill climb.”

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Patricia Wall/The New York Times

After all, the school’s unappetizing campus is adjacent to a wholesale seafood distributor in an industrial park. “The first action item is a redesign of the Galer Street logo,” the letter says. “Much as I love clip-art handprints, let’s try to find an image that better articulates success.”

Next: a letter to “a blackberry abatement specialist” from a stingy, sanctimonious crank named Audrey Griffin, who wants her yard cleared of prickly blackberry bushes in time for the school’s fund-raising party. Audrey would much rather give orders to this landscaper than pay him. “Blessings, and help yourself to some chard,” she writes in closing.

The above is only an introductory sampling of how Maria Semple has put together this divinely funny, many-faceted novel. Before she wrote books, Ms. Semple was a television writer (for shows including “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You”), and that turns out to be a very good thing.

Her first novel, “This One Is Mine,” was written in standard narrative style, but “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” leaves convention behind. Instead, it plays to Ms. Semple’s strengths as someone who can practice ventriloquism in many voices, skip over the mundane and utterly refute the notion that mixed-media fiction is bloggy, slack or lazy.

The tightly constructed “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is written in many formats — e-mails, letters, F.B.I. documents, correspondence with a psychiatrist and even an emergency-room bill for a run-in between Bernadette and Audrey. Yet these pieces are strung together so wittily that Ms. Semple’s storytelling is always front and center, in sharp focus. You could stop and pay attention to how apt each new format is, how rarely she repeats herself and how imaginatively she unveils every bit of information. But you would have to stop laughing first.

Everyone in this sparkling novel is wily, smart or even smarter. The brainiest character is arguably Elgin, who works at Microsoft and leads the design team for what, the book says, is Bill Gates’s favorite project. Elgin is famed for not wearing shoes, for giving the fourth-most-watched TED talk and for generally being Microsoft’s version of a rock star.

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Maria SempleCredit
Leta Warner

His athletic habits are pure Seattle: for a morning bicycle workout he puts on a heart-rate monitor, a shoulder brace of his own invention and what Bee calls “goony fluorescent racing pants.” Then he swigs “green juice of his own making” and chooses a recumbent bike to counteract the way the hills affect his wrists. Bernadette doesn’t hate him, but she sure hates that kind of Seattle chic.

Bernadette’s loathing for Seattle does not stop her from delivering endless, razor-sharp wisecracks about the place. And part of why she resents her new home (“there are two hairstyles here: short gray hair and long gray hair”) is because she is out of her element. She fled Los Angeles for reasons the book does not immediately explain. She strikes Seattle residents as a Microsoft-moneyed snob who really ought to switch to decaf.

Bernadette, for her part, calls Galer Street parents “gnats,” and treats them accordingly. When she deigns to show up at the school, Audrey complains that “she’s like Franklin Delano Roosevelt” because she stays in her car, so that the other parents see her only from the waist up. Bernadette and Audrey treat each other so spitefully that it’s a damn shame when they stop fighting.

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In a sublime plot thread that begins with Audrey and the blackberries and spirals toward comedy heaven (watch what happens to Kyle, Audrey’s doted-on little delinquent son), Bernadette does major, unintentional damage to the Galer Street community. As a consequence — and for the second time in her secretive life — she has to disappear.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” signals that fact with its punchy, TV-style title. Then it travels to one of the most surreal places on earth so that the Branch family can, at long last, resolve the real troubles that underlie the book’s humor.

There’s much more merriment to Bernadette’s getting lost than to if, when and how she will be found. But Ms. Semple adores her heroine too much to treat her lightly. So this book eventually acknowledges how miserable Bernadette has been. But it makes her a great, endearing presence, whether she’s happy or sad, here or gone.

WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE

By Maria Semple

330 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.

A version of this review appears in print on August 7, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Skewering Seattle’s Microsoft Elite. Today's Paper|Subscribe